Waste not, want not: How Eastern Market is tackling food waste

This story is published in partnership with Planet Detroit .

For decades, late Saturday afternoons at Eastern Market were chaotic, with dumped and half-rotten produce stacked 10-12 feet high around Sheds 2 and 3.

“Some of it was fit for human consumption and could be taken at low or no cost,” recalled Jim Sutherland, facilities director for Eastern Market Partnership, the nonprofit that took over the market’s operation from the city in 2006. “But if vendors couldn’t sell it, they’d leave it for us to clean up.”

Some vendors even brought rotten produce from offsite to take advantage of “free” waste disposal. The produce would attract rats and fester until the city came to clean up the mess.

“The city would come with a dump truck and front-end loader, slam the stuff against the building, scoop it up, smear it everywhere, and off they would go,” Sutherland said.

Those days are over. Sutherland said it took a couple of years to retrain vendors to stop using the market as a trash dump and to use dumpsters. For the past 15 years, he said, the place has been much cleaner and more hospitable.

But that doesn’t mean its food waste problem is solved. Brandon Seng, director of programs, estimates that about half a million pounds of wasted food flows through Eastern Market each year.

“It’s not insignificant,” Seng said.

Seng said the nonprofit is exploring ways to reduce food waste — including large-scale composting and a food rescue initiative.

The cost of food waste

Seng said food waste disposal has gotten increasingly expensive in recent years.

“It used to be 25 bucks to get rid of a pallet out of the produce terminal, and now it’s doubled,” he said.

He suspects this helps explain why food vendors have gotten increasingly brazen about dumping their food waste at the market.

Sutherland said the change has been noticeable since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It seems like in the last year or so, maybe two years coming out of the pandemic (lockdowns), I see the same mindset of kind of, screw it, and you start to see a rise again of people … leaving the pallets — a watermelon box, whatever it might be — just next to the dumpster.”

Seng said one area of success has been the ability of produce wholesalers to better forecast sales. Tom LaGrasso III, president and CEO of LaGrasso Bros., said the produce company has implemented software to better understand fluctuations in demand.

“The goal is to not have any (waste) because you lose money,” LaGrasso said. “So the better we can get at forecasting and projecting sales … that improves our operation from a profitability standpoint. We get better every year.”

Past efforts met mixed success

But some waste is inevitable, and the solution is twofold: rescuing food that’s fit for human consumption and turning expired food into soil so it doesn’t wind up in a landfill. Before the pandemic, Sutherland said the market piloted projects to address those two issues, with some success.

“There are really two things that get to the crux of why there’s really any food waste,” he said. “Number one, it’s a high cost of labor to collect and sort this stuff. And the second part of it is … a lot of the produce is all in 1-pound plastic containers. That labor and that sorting are massive costs.”

In the 2010s, Eastern Market partnered with the food rescue nonprofit Forgotten Harvest to pick up edible food at the end of market days and distribute it to food pantries.

“Forgotten Harvest was very successful in pulling significant poundage — dozens and hundreds of tons — out of the waste stream,” Sutherland said. “It helped cut our volume of waste hauling, and the dealers had a way to not have to take it or hide it somewhere else.”

Sutherland said he can’t recall why or exactly when the partnership ended, and Forgotten Harvest did not respond to an inquiry.

Similarly, a partnership with the nonprofit Detroit Dirt to convert expired produce to compost saw some success. The program supplied vendors with 60-gallon containers for expired produce, which Detroit Dirt would pick up and transport to its composting facility in Southwest Detroit.

Detroit Dirt co-founder Pashon Murray said the program ended in 2012 because Eastern Market didn’t offer a contract or payment for services. But she’s hopeful that might change, given the state and federal governments’ new focus on sustainability.

“With all of the funding through the Biden-Harris administration, there are opportunities to ramp back up and kind of activate potential partnerships that were there in the beginning,” she said.

What’s next for Eastern Market’s food waste

Market officials are in talks with Food Rescue US , which uses volunteers to pick up extra food and deliver it to food pantries.

Sutherland and Darraugh Collins, a Food Rescue US site director who launched its operations in Detroit, said an initial attempt to start a program at Eastern Market in 2022 failed because of challenges in building relationships with vendors. But they’ve been in recent conversations about trying again.

Collins said her organization has been picking up excess produce from the Oakland County Farmers Market and the Royal Oak Farmers Market, and is in talks with the Downtown Rochester Farmers’ Market. She said they’ve picked up almost 200,000 pounds of food from the Oakland County and Royal Oak markets since 2021.

On the composting side, Seng is investigating the feasibility of installing an anaerobic digester to turn rotten produce into compost that can be used in landscaping around Eastern Market, or even sold.

Anaerobic digestion is a process in which bacteria decompose organic materials in an airtight container, producing biogas and digestate — a nutrient-rich byproduct that can be used as compost.

Some environmental groups favor aerobic composting because anaerobic digestion produces methane, a greenhouse gas. However, open compost piles can attract vermin and produce foul odors. Seng said the market is also looking into aerobic composting.

Whatever the solution, Seng said, the issue of food waste is top-of-mind.

“It’s something that the market has put forward as one of our highest priorities in terms of future sustainability and development in the district,” Seng said. “We need to do something here to make sure that we’re we continue to lead, and we believe this is one of the most pressing issues.”

Waste not, want not: How Eastern Market is tackling food waste · Outlier Media